Ed Roberts R.I.P. (1941-2010)

The tech world mourns one of the first successful PC entrepreneurs today. Ed Roberts c0-founder of MITS passed away at 68 last night. Plaudits worldwide are being made by all the usual suspects, especially from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the guys that wrote the first successful app for MITS’s Altair 8800, a version of the BASIC programming language (that hobbyists and hackers easily shared amongst themselves without paying for the license fee, prompting Bill Gates first open screed against the free-wheeling hacker community. Bill Warren, editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal, zinged Bill Gates with a stinging economical retort.).